In recent years, a great deal of attention has been focused on repetitive brain injuries suffered by football players. These repetitive brain injuries may lead to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease. The most recent research suggests that the disease may result from repetitive blows to the head, even if those impacts do not result in full concussions. The adverse effects of CTE may not be felt by a player during his playing years, but effects later in life can be very severe. A number of former football players suffer significant levels of dementia or even premature death due to these repetitive injuries.
Some have suggested that football players know the risks of the sport, and thus have assumed the risk of this type of injury by deciding to participate. Many persons involved in football, however, see a warning alone as inadequate. Professional football players often come from a low-income background, and may feel obligated to undergo these risks in order to support themselves and their families. This applies to college players as well, who may have no means by which to afford a college education other than through a football scholarship. Many thus feel that football leagues and organizations have an obligation to protect the boys and men who play this sport. Now that these adverse effects are becoming better understood, a significant number of parents have refused to allow their sons to play football. If no adequate protection is found against CTE, then the public may lose interest in football altogether, as people come to see it as a sport that is simply too dangerous to merit their support.
Football programs such as the National Football League have begun to address this problem. For example, the NFL now implements a “concussion protocol” that requires certain tests be performed before a player who has suffered a significant blow to the head may be allowed back in the game. But because it is now known that it is the repetitive nature of the blows that leads to CTE, and not necessarily the force of one particular blow, it will be understood that the conclusion protocol is inadequate on its own to fully protect players from adverse effects of CTE later in life. In addition, the NFL has instituted a number of rules changes intended to reduce the number of blows to the head that are suffered during play. These rules also cannot fully protect players, because head-to-head collisions are often unintentional; for example, even though a defensive player may redirect his head away from an offensive player's head as he begins a tackle, the offensive player may inadvertently move his head into the path of the defensive player while trying to avoid the tackle, and the dangerous collision nevertheless occurs. Many defensive backfield players have become frustrated with these rules, which severely penalize them even in situations where there would be no practical way for the player to avoid the dangerous head-to-head collision. Another problem is that many of the head-to-head collisions occur between players on the same team, such as when two players attempting to make a tackle from different angles miss the ball carrier and instead strike each other. No rules changes will prevent this sort of dangerous impact.
There has been a great deal of research and development in recent years toward improving the helmet worn by football players in order to better protect players from harm. Although the new helmet designs do improve upon the older designs, they are incremental in nature and do not provide full protection to the player from head-to-head collisions, hits to the side of the head, or hits to the back of the helmet (which often result from a player being knocked to the ground and the back of the helmet striking the ground). The reason that these designs have not been fully successful is that the amount of padding that would provide full protection to a player would make the helmet so large that it could not practically be worn during play. This is not a function of the quality of the padding or design of the helmet, but is simply a limitation imposed by physics given the very large amount of energy imposed upon the helmet during a head-on collision between two very strong, very fast athletes.
For all of these reasons, it would be highly desirable to develop an apparatus that would fully protect a football player from brain injuries, regardless of whether the hit occurs at the front of the helmet, the side of the helmet, or the rear of the helmet. Furthermore, given the very large investment in existing helmets and related technology, it would also be desirable to develop such an apparatus that can be used with existing helmet designs.
References mentioned in this background section are not admitted to be prior art with respect to the present invention.